Category : Software News

The downloadable tool offers access to RSS readers through the browser, though not to the doomed Google Reader.

Tech enthusiasts upset over Google’s recent decision to scrap Google Reader and other products may have one reason to be happy again: They can still subscribe to RSS feeds through an extension within the Chrome browser.

Chrome’s RSS (Really Simple Syndication) subscription extension was deleted in the wake of the company’s multi-faceted product shutdown last week but is now back up and running, Finnur Thorarinsson, the extension’s author, reported on an online forum on Tuesday.

The extension had been removed by mistake and is now available for download again on Chrome’s Web store, he wrote.

The Chrome add-in is designed to auto-detect RSS feeds on websites. Upon discovery of a feed, an icon appears on the screen that lets users preview the feed content and then subscribe to it.

The tool is not specifically linked to Google Reader. it comes with the Bloglines and My Yahoo readers predefined, though users can also choose from any Web-based feed reader to view RSS feed content.

Although the extension is up and running, Google Reader has been removed from the list of available feed readers, “to prevent [new users] from getting hooked on Reader and then be disappointed in a few months time,” Thorarinsson wrote. Google Reader is scheduled to be shut down in July.

Google axed eight products last week in its latest round of “spring cleaning,” in an effort to focus its offerings and take advantage of new opportunities, the company said.

Loyal users voiced strong opposition to the company’s decision to scrap Google Reader, with thousands petitioning Google to bring it back. Many fans in the meantime have taken to Twitter to suggest alternative RSS readers.

Thorarinsson includes himself in that group of disgruntled users. “I’m an avid user of Google Reader,” he wrote, “and am pretty unhappy about the Reader situation as well.”

Google Reader was launched in 2005 to help people follow and keep track of updates to their favorite websites.

Google could not immediately be reached to comment on this story.

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Responds to claims that the DOJ and SEC are scrutinizing deals in China, Romania and Italy by Microsoft and its partners.

Microsoft today said it would cooperate with federal regulators who are reportedly investigating claims that some of its business partners bribed officials in China, Romania and Italy to close deals.

“We take all allegations brought to our attention seriously and we cooperate fully in any government inquiries,” said John Frank, a Microsoft deputy counsel, in an emailed statement today. “Like other large companies with operations around the world we sometimes receive allegations about potential misconduct by employees or business partners and we investigate them fully regardless of the source.”

Frank, who expanded on that theme in a longer blog post Tuesday, was responding to a report in today’s Wall Street Journal (paid subscription required) that an executive in Microsoft’s China subsidiary told a partner to offer officials kickbacks in return for signing new software contracts.

U.S. regulators at the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) are also allegedly investigating whether Microsoft partners in Romania and Italy offered bribes or gave extravagant gifts to government procurement officials, the newspaper said.

Frank did not deny or confirm the investigations, but said, “It is appropriate that both Microsoft and the government review them.”

He also downplayed the possibility that Microsoft itself was involved, hinting that rogue behavior was at the root of any allegations, and that it was impossible to police the company’s huge number of employees — more than 98,000 — and its even larger ecosystem, which counts over 640,000 partners.

“In a company of our size, allegations of this nature will be made from time to time,” Frank wrote on the Microsoft blog. “It is also possible there will sometimes be individual employees or business partners who violate our policies and break the law. It isn’t possible to say there will never be wrongdoing.”

The Department of Justice was not immediately available for comment on the Wall Street Journal’s claims. The SEC declined to comment.

Frank also pointed out — in a paragraph that included the line, “It is important to remember that it is not unusual for such reviews to find that an allegation was without merit” — that the Wall Street Journal had reported earlier this week on allegations that the publication paid Chinese officials for information.

The Wall Street Journal and its parent company, Dow Jones, have denied any wrongdoing, and suggested that the supposed tipster was actually a government agent, part of a plot to retaliate for the newspaper’s reporting on Chinese leaders.

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An economist said at an evidentiary hearing that Oracle’s decision to stop porting to Itanium permanently hurt HP

Hewlett-Packard may seek damages of US$4 billion to $4.2 billion from Oracle in its lawsuit over support for Itanium server architecture.

An economist that HP plans to call in the case made the estimate at an evidentiary hearing on Monday in Santa Clara County Superior Court in San Jose, California. The economist, Jonathan Orszag of the consulting firm Compass Lexecon, estimated the difference between HP’s Itanium-related revenue with and without Oracle’s March 2011 announcement that it would stop porting software to Itanium.

“The Oracle conduct at question in this case had a very significant and negative effect on the HP Itanium business,” Orszag said during questioning by HP’s legal team.

HP sued Oracle in June 2011, saying the company had breached a contract when it stopped porting software to the Itanium platform, which powers HP’s so-called mission-critical servers for large enterprises. Last August, Oracle was ordered to resume Itanium support, a decision the company is appealing. The case is now being prepared for a jury trial to determine what damages, if any, HP is entitled to. On Monday, the two sides began presenting the testimony of their planned expert witnesses for approval by the judge in the case, James Kleinberg.

Oracle’s announcement has hurt HP’s Itanium business since the March 2011 announcement and will continue to affect it through at least 2020, Orszag said. He said he chose that end date based on road maps for the platform from HP and its Itanium chip partner, Intel.

In the second quarter of HP’s 2011 fiscal year, during which the March 2011 announcement was made, the company’s Itanium revenue fell 11 percent compared with a year earlier, Orszag said. The next quarter it fell 18.1 percent year over year, and the following quarters saw declines of 32 percent and then 38 percent.

“You see this snowballing effect,” Orszag said.

The uncertainty caused by Oracle’s decision made customers turn away from Itanium when making long-term platform decisions, he said. “They don’t want to have the risk associated with some fight, or some delay, or some issue,” Orszag said.

Though Oracle announced after last August’s order that it would resume the porting work, and said on Monday that no customer was deprived of any software, 17 months of disruption permanently damaged the Itanium business, Orszag said. “You cannot hit pause in a technology market,” he said.

Oracle’s attorneys and its own intended expert witness, economist Ramsey Shehadeh of consulting firm National Economic Research Associates, questioned Orszag’s method of estimating the damages.

Orszag didn’t consider other factors that may have affected HP’s Itanium business, including a decline in HP’s reputation amid the upheaval of executive changes there over the past few years, they said. Another key factor they cited was information that has become public about Itanium nearing the end of its life, according to Oracle and Shahadeh. Oracle alleges that HP hid information about its dealings with Intel that showed the platform is on the way to being phased out.

The impending jury trial will be the second phase of the case, which first came before Judge Kleinberg last June. Last year, Kleinberg heard arguments from both sides over whether a partnership agreement between the companies constituted a contract, and in August he ruled that they did and ordered Oracle to resume porting.

The origins of the conflict go back at least as far as Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems in early 2010. That brought Oracle into the server business and made the two companies hardware rivals for the first time.

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Microsoft’s support for Windows Phone 8 and Windows Phone 7.8 will end in the second half of 2014, according to the software maker.

Microsoft listed the sunset dates on its Web site recently, with WP8 support ending July 8, 2014, and WP7.8 support ending Sept. 9, 2014.

Both dates are 18 months after the support lifecycle starting date. The updates provide changes and improvements to the OS, including security, that are distributed by either the wireless operator or the phone manufacturer, Microsoft said.

The support lifecycle for Windows RT, which runs on tablets from various manufacturers, has not been detailed, although Microsoft said last fall that the policy “will be communicated as available.” As of Monday, that policy remained in place for Windows RT on the Microsoft site.

Last November, Microsoft said its support of Surface RT tablets (also running Windows RT) would expire April 11, 2017. That time frame is less than half the usual 10 years of support that Microsoft gives its software products. For its Windows Phones, the time frame is less than one-fifth as long.

The 18 months for Windows Phone support might seem limited, but most wireless carriers, phone makers and phone OS makers typically view the lifetime of a phone as two years in the U.S. That’s one reason why carriers sign customers to two-year contracts. Still, the two-year U.S. approach is challenged by the three-year contracts offered by many Canadian carriers.

Even some new phone models are being updated in about a year, as has happened with the Samsung Galaxy S III introduced in 2012, which will be updated to the new Galaxy S4 when it ships this April.

Analysts are eager to see how many GSIII users will move to the GS4. The GS4 runs Android 4.2.2.

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New smartphone has a bigger, sharper screen compared with the Galaxy S III (launch video below)

Samsung has taken the wraps off of its new Galaxy S4 smartphone, which will support global LTE roaming and has front- and rear-facing cameras that can be used simultaneously, the company said.

Samsung introduced the phone Thursday evening during a launch event at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall. The event was also broadcast live to people watching in New York’s Times Square.

One new feature is that the front- and rear-facing cameras can be used at the same time. This will allow a person to make a video call while simultaneously showing people on the other end of the line what they’re looking at, Samsung says.

Two photos taken simultaneously can also be combined in various ways, by placing a small photo within a larger one, for instance. It remains to be seen if it will be a useful feature or only a novelty.

The S4 has a slightly bigger screen than the S III, at 5 in., and weighs a fraction less, at 130 grams. It’s also slightly slimmer, at 7.9 millimeters thick.

It will be offered with a 1.9GHz quad-core processor or a 1.6GHz octa-core processor, depending on the market, Samsung said.

The phone will be available from 327 operators in 155 countries starting at the end of April, Samsung said. It didn’t give much more shipping information than that, except to say it will be released in the U.S. in the second quarter. The operators it will be available from include AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, Deutsche Telecom, Orange and Vodafone. Samsung didn’t provide any pricing information.

The Galaxy S4 supports HSPA+42 Mbps and 4G LTE, which Samsung said will provide connectivity anywhere in the world. The LTE version supports up to six different band sets, allowing for global LTE roaming, according to Samsung. A dual-mode TDD/FDD LTE version will be introduced later this year, Samsung said.

The networks supported will allow for download speeds of 100 megabits per second and upload speeds of 50 megabits per second, Samsung said.

The screen is a Super AMOLED display with 441 pixels per inch. It comes with 2GB of DDR3 memory and storage options of 16GB, 32GB and 64GB. A MicroSD card slot can expand that by an extra 64GB.

The phone will come in two colors at launch, black and white, or what Samsung calls “black mist” and “white frost.” Other colors will follow later.

It has a 13-megapixel camera on the back and a 2-megapixel camera on the front.

Samsung executives also discussed a new “visual effects” engine used to spruce up the interface. The black bar across the top of the screen is gone, with information about battery life and signal strength displayed in a translucent bar that’s supposed to blend in more with the rest of the screen.

The phone gets two new sensors over the existing Galaxy S III — an infrared gesture sensor and a sensor for temperature and humidity. They should allow developers to build a wider range of apps.

The S4 can also be used as a TV remote, executives said. It will run Android 4.2.2, Jelly Bean. It has a removable, 2,600 mAh (milliAmphour) battery, up from 2100 mAh on the S III.

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Questions two-OS tablet strategy, urges Microsoft to put shoulder behind Windows

Microsoft’s two-pronged OS push into tablets — Windows RT and Windows 8 — confuses customers, and the company should focus on the more robust Windows 8, an IDC analyst said today.

Tom Mainelli, IDC’s research director for tablets, said Microsoft’s decision to pitch both operating systems as tablet-ready has not worked. “Two OSes for tablets has resulted in confusion on the consumer side,” said Mainelli in an interview. “Microsoft has had a difficult time spelling out why consumers would choose Windows RT over iOS or Android.”

Mainelli isn’t the first analyst to call out Microsoft for its decision to split its tablet attack — similar criticisms were leveled from the start — but IDC’s estimates of future sales adds extra weight to his take.

According to IDC’s forecast, Windows RT tablets will end 2013 with only a 1.9% share of the year’s shipments, or 3.6 million devices out of total of 190.4 million. That’s not much more than Apple sold in three days after the iPad Mini launch last fall.

In comparison, 93.2 million Android tablets and 87.8 million iOS-powered iPads will ship this year, as Google’s mobile operating system takes the top spot for the first time.

Rather than devote time and energy to Windows RT, Microsoft should put its tablet bet on Windows 8, the full-featured OS. “People may not love Windows 8, but it’s compatible with the software they’ve always run,” Mainelli said. “RT may look like Windows, but in fact it’s not.”

Windows RT devices can run only Windows Store apps, those written for the WinRT API (application programming interface), and cannot run so-called “legacy” software, the kind that users are familiar with and that work in Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.

Microsoft allows its own Office and Internet Explorer to run on restricted “desktop” on Windows RT, but bars others from doing the same.

Windows 8 tablets will capture 2.8% of the market by the end of 2013, IDC estimated, representing 5.3 million units. But by 2017, when Windows RT still sports a flagging share of 2.7% — 9.5 million of the projected 350 million tablets for the year — Windows 8 will have more than doubled its share of the market, climbing to 7.4%, or 25.9 million devices.

In 2017, IDC forecast shipments of 161 million Android tablets and 152.3 million iPads.

Microsoft’s OEM (original equipment manufacturers) partners have been just as bearish on Windows RT as IDC. In January, Samsung — a key tablet maker — said it wouldn’t release a Windows RT device in the U.S. And earlier this month, the South Korean electronics giant confirmed it was pulling its Windows RT-powered Ativ Tab from European sales channels.

Mainelli stopped short of saying Windows RT was a flop — “It’s not a bad product,” he argued — but said it was clear Microsoft made the wrong design choice, then followed with muddied marketing.

“There’s a reason why Apple scaled iOS from the phone to the tablet, why Google scaled Android from the phone to the tablet,” said Mainelli. “That makes a lot of sense, there are synergies there.”

Microsoft famously decided on a different path, instead taking a subset of its Windows desktop operating system, porting it to the ARM processor architecture, and calling it Windows RT.

“Consumers aren’t buying Windows RT’s value proposition, and long term we think Microsoft and its partners would be better served by focusing their attention on improving Windows 8,” said Mainelli in a Tuesday statement accompanying its revised tablet forecast. “Such a focus could drive better share growth in the tablet category down the road.”

He elaborated in the interview.

“As new processors come along, Microsoft should make a big push that Windows 8 is its tablet OS,” said Mainelli. “That has the potential to have legs.”

But Microsoft could take another tack, Mainelli acknowledged, citing the quick shift in tablets to devices with screens 8-in. or smaller. This quarter, more than half of all tablets shipped will be of that size.

“We may see Windows RT shifted to tablets of smaller sizes and lower prices,” Mainelli speculated.

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The company’s SDN strategy and programmable chips give it an edge over rivals, executives said.

For the Internet of Things to become a reality, networks need to get a whole lot smarter and more flexible, according to Cisco.

The company aims to build an “Internet of Everything” that will link sensors, mobile devices and network infrastructure, Chief Strategy and Technology Officer Padmasree Warrior said Wednesday.

Cisco estimates this will be a US$14.4 trillion business opportunity, with ways to make and save money in sectors including manufacturing, health care, smart power grids and the public sector. Services that bring in data from many sources and require distributed processing will make networks even more crucial than they are today, the company says.

“Ninety-nine percent of the things in the world today are still not connected to the Internet,” said Rob Lloyd, Cisco’s president for sales and development, who joined Warrior for a press day at the company’s headquarters in San Jose, California.

Though there are 92 different legacy protocols used in connected devices today, Cisco expects most of those objects eventually to connect using IP (Internet Protocol), playing into Cisco’s own area of strength.

Programmability will be crucial to making those combined systems useful, Warrior said. Cisco hopes to take advantage of that with its Cisco ONE software-defined networking strategy and the internally developed processors in its gear.

As an example of a use for this new type of infrastructure, Warrior laid out a way shoppers might plan a trip to a downtown store. The retailer’s mobile app could share real-time data about wait times in the store and combine that with information from a city-run system that used embedded sensors to determine how many parking spaces were free nearby. Drivers arriving at the parking lot could make a short-range peer-to-peer wireless connection with a kiosk to get a map to the nearest space available at that time.

Cisco has equipped a parking lot at its own headquarters with such sensors under each space, with a system to reserve room for a car and then find the nearest available space on arriving. This can prevent time and fuel wasted looking for parking, Warrior said.

The combination of sensor data, cloud-based services and distributed, local processing will be repeated across many industries, Warrior said. It will fuel new types of applications that will require more programmable networks, she said.

Cisco ONE is the company’s strategy to make networks better understand applications. At its core is onePK (ONE Platform Kit), which will include 710 APIs (application programming interfaces) that developers can use to take advantage of features in Cisco’s existing and future network equipment, according to Lloyd. Those APIs will let developers address the US$180 billion installed base of Cisco gear, he said.

Cisco ONE has been called Cisco’s answer to SDN (software-defined networking), though the company says it’s going beyond other SDN approaches, which focus on separating the control from the transport layer of the network.

“Our vision is much broader. We see the network as a platform,” Warrior said. Cisco says its approach allows for more programmability.

The company’s ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits) bring another element of programmability, Lloyd said, showing off chips for Cisco’s Catalyst 3850 switch and ASR1000 Aggregation Services Routers. Developers will be able to gain access to the software that runs on those ASICs through Cisco ONE, Lloyd said.

“ASICs in the products, with software and services, I think, is going to allow Cisco to really, really shake this industry,” Lloyd said.

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The company will destroy all personal data inadvertently collected by its Street View cars.

Google will pay $7 million to settle complaints from dozens of U.S. states about its unauthorized collection of personal data transmitted over Wi-Fi networks.

The money will be paid to 37 states and the District of Columbia, which had gone after Google after it admitted that its Street View cars had collected the data inadvertently between 2008 and 2010.

As well as photographing their surroundings, the Street View cars collect data about the location of Wi-Fi access points to help with Google’s navigation services. It was during that process that the company’s cars collected personal information sent over those networks.

As part of the settlement, Google said it would destroy the personal data it collected.

It has also removed the equipment and software used to collect the data from its Street View vehicles and will not collect additional information without prior notice and consent, the Attorney General of New York said in a statement.

It’s a relatively small sum for a company of Google’s size. To put the settlement in context, it’s a little more than the $6 million bonus that Google will pay Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt for his work at the company in 2012, according to a regulatory filing Tuesday.

Google will also provide a training program to its employees for 10 years about privacy and the confidentiality of user data, and will launch a public-service advertising campaign to educate consumers about keeping their personal information secure on Wi-Fi networks.

The disclosure by Google that it collected the information drew attention worldwide. Google paid a $130,000 fine to France’s National Commission on Computing and Liberty, while a public prosecutor in Germany declined to launch a criminal investigation.

Google also paid a $25,000 fine to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission for delaying an investigation into the issue.

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Even Apple’s iPad Mini can’t stop Android as buyers gravitate to cheaper choices

Aggressive sales of smaller tablets triggered a revised tablet sales forecast today by IDC, which upped its projections by 11% for 2013 and said Android would supplant Apple’s iOS as the dominant operating system this year.

“The shift to smaller screen sizes, and lower prices, is the driving force behind this transition from iOS to Android, and to larger shipments,” said Tom Mainelli, IDC research director for tablets, in an interview today.

IDC boosted its estimate of total tablet shipments during 2013 from an earlier 172.4 million devices to 190.9 million, a 10.7% increase. Today’s revised forecast came just three months after IDC’s last, when it raised estimates for 2013 by 4%, from 165.9 million to 172.4 million.

According to IDC, one of two tablets shipped this quarter sported a screen 8-in. or smaller.

Apple entered that space last October when it launched the iPad Mini, a 7.9-in. smaller sibling of the original iPad that, by some accounts, has seriously cannibalized sales of the company’s larger model.

Even at its debut, analysts criticized Apple for sticking with its premium pricing model: The iPad Mini starts at $329, while Google’s $199 Nexus 7 sells for 40% less.

The iPad Mini won’t keep Apple in the driver’s seat this year, Mainelli said. “The trend has been there, but this will be the first time Android overtakes iOS in the market,” he said, citing his team’s forecast for 2013-2017.

For the year, Android-powered tablets will account for 48.8% of all devices shipped, edging iOS’ 46%. During 2012, IDC pegged Android’s share at 42.7%, iOS’ at 53.8%. The new numbers represent almost an eight-point drop for iOS, and a six-point increase for Android as the two switch places this year on the sales share chart.

During the next five years — IDC’s standard forecast timespan — iOS’ share will continue to shrink. As will Android’s. “Over the long term, Windows will start cutting into [iOS’ and Android’s] shares,” predicted Mainelli.

In 2017, IDC expects that Android’s share will be 46% and iOS’ at 43.5%, with Windows — a combination of the full-fledged Windows and Windows RT, the tablet-specific, limited-function operating system — accounting for 10.1%.

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Tech studies are cool again as students see degrees leading to jobs in many fields; Ph.D. enrollment reaches new high, survey finds.

The number of new undergraduate computing majors in U.S. computer science departments increased more than 29% last year, a pace called “astonishing” by the Computing Research Association.

The increase was the fifth straight annual computer science enrollment gain, according to the CRA’s annual survey of computer science departments at Ph.D.-granting institutions.

The 2011-12 academic year also saw the third straight year of double digit growth at these schools, according to the survey.

The CRA also reports gains by schools who participated in in the survey both this year and last year. The enrollment gain for those schools was nearly 23%, it said.

The enrollment gains are also reflected in bachelor degree programs, which enrollws 20% more computer science majors than last year.

Computer enrollments “are somewhat cyclical based on the perceived strength of the IT sector,” said Peter Harsha, the CRA’s director of government affairs.

But in regard to the recent upward trend, Harsha said CRA members are saying that “students are much more aware of the importance of computational thinking in just about every other field of science and technology.”

Harsha said that many fields “are increasingly data-driven and computationally-driven, and students see that a degree in computer science gives them access to a wide range of well-paying careers.”

The CRA’s annual Taulbee Survey has been tracking computer science enrollments and degrees granted for many years at Ph.D-granting schools and has turned up some interesting trends.

The survey is named after the late Orrin Taulbee, the first chairman of the University of Pittsburgh’s computer science department.

In 1999, with the emergence of an e-commerce business, enrollments hit new highs, according to the survey, with the average computer science department having an enrollment of about 400 students. But with the dot-com crash, enrollments fell and hit bottom around 2007, at 200 per department.

The average enrollment per department today is just over 300.

Women remain underrepresented in computer science, but latest survey did report an uptick in new female graduates.

The percentage of women graduating with a bachelor’s degree in computer science rose from 11.7% in the 2010-11 academic year to 12.9% in 2011-12. But in computer engineering the fraction of female graduates decreased, to 10.6% from 11.8%.

The survey also found that more students are earning a Ph.D., with 1,929 degrees granted – an 8.2% increase over the prior year.

The pool of undergraduate students represented in the CRA survey is 67,850. Of that number, 57,500 are in computer science.

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